How We Skyped in the FL Classroom

Time to share what a wonderful experience this semester’s e-twinning project with Seth Dickens at Martino Martini has been, and in particular the final culminating technological project, the Skype calls.
Over the semester, as mentioned in a previous post, Seth and I introduced our students to Twitter to give them an opportunity to interact and engage [...]

I’m still here

Finding it difficult to juggle end of term and many other “ends” right now so I haven’t blogged in about a month!
I will be blogging soon because Seth Dickens and I have a virtual meet-up planned for our students on Thursday morning. Looking so forward to it because after a good number of [...]

Calico ‘09 musings

I was fortunate enough to have a paper accepted at the 26th annual conference of Calico ’09,  my first Calico conference ever. It was an experience that surpassed any and all expectations (how often can we say that?!). Different aspects of the conference that made it so memorable include the venue, the presentations, the participants [...]

E-Twinning: NJ & Trento

Why we learn foreign languages…to understand better the world in which we are living thus, in turn, understand ourselves and our homeland better. Except, with globalization people think barriers are being removed and everyone should just be able to speak English, since it is considered a global language.
But that is not globalization. Cultural globalization does [...]

word(le) cloud

I finally decided to create my own twitter wordle…words have great significance, even when taken out of context, wouldn’t you agree? Here is what is important to me evidently

Arriverderci AP Italian?

Just 4 years into it…and now this!
In the fall, I had published an article on Italian teacher training in Foreign Language Annals (the journal for the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages). Shortly before its publication, the editor had asked me to comment on the then recent decision of the College Board to [...]

Similies & smiles

Happy 2009!
Before I get back to the grind, I had to catch up on some e-reading…tweets, blogs, news. It seems that some people never really take a break from their social networks, and for that I am grateful. Much reading, as you can imagine, also occurred as it was written, in real time, so to [...]

Pageflakes as a LMS

I had the opportunity over the last semester to use Pageflakes as a learning management system for my intermediate Italian course. The basis of this undertaking was the following, as prepared by @kahnp:
This study proposes a project to significantly enhance student success in a college intermediate Italian course by using new technologies and multimedia that [...]

Using the right tech tool for teaching…how did you decide?

I have deliberated this post to death, wanting to ensure that I made a positive contribution to the discussion of social network sites (SNS). As an educator, my use of SNS is always from a professional perspective (yeah, right), wanting to investigate different tools for language learning and teaching.
During one of the umpteenth [...]

Twitter in the Foreign Language Classroom – my investigation

Another update: paper has been removed as it is under revisions as  you read this. Will share once again in the near future…
update: if you would like to read the manuscript, it is password protected. Thanks for the head’s up Luke.
I’ll keep this post brief and to the point, as I should be concentrating on [...]